Where were the Liebermanns' decapitated bodies? Stuffed in the big oven, behind steel doors that had no windows? Lying stiff and frosted in the walk-in refrigerator?
Bitterness rose in her throat, but she choked it back.
The .45 revolver now seemed an ineffectual defense against this incredibly violent, unknown enemy.
Again, Jenny had the feeling of being watched, and the drumbeat of her heart was no longer snare but timpani.
She turned to Lisa. “Let's get out of here.”
The girl headed for the storeroom door.
“Not that way!” Jenny said sharply.
Lisa turned, blinking, confused.
“Not the alley,” Jenny said sharply.
Lisa turned, blinking, confused.
“Not the alley,” Jenny said. “And not that dark passage again.”
“God, no,” Lisa agreed.
They hurried across the kitchen and through the other door, into the sales room. Past the empty pastry cases. Past the cafe tables and chairs.
Jenny had some trouble with the deadbolt lock on the front door. It was stiff. She thought they might have to leave by way of the alley, after all. Then she realized she was trying to turn the thumb-latch the wrong way. Twisted the proper direction, the bolt slipped back with a clack, and Jenny yanked the door open.
They rushed out into the cool, night air.
Lisa crossed the sidewalk to a tall pine tree. She seemed to need to lean against something.
Jenny joined her sister, glancing back apprehensively at the bakery. She wouldn't have been surprised to see two decapitated bodies shambling toward her with demonic intent. But nothing moved back there except the scalloped edge of the blue-and-white-striped awning, which undulated in the inconstant breeze.
The night remained silent.
The moon had risen somewhat higher in the sky since Jenny and Lisa had entered the covered passageway.
After a while the girl said, “Radiation, disease, poison, toxic gas — boy, we sure were on the wrong walk. Only other people, sick people, do that kind of weird stuff. Right? Some weird psycho did all of this.”
Jenny shook her head. “One man can't have done it all. To overwhelm a town of nearly five hundred people, it would take an army of psychopathic killers.”
“Then that's what it was,” Lisa said, shivering.
Jenny looked nervously up and down the deserted street. It seemed imprudent, even reckless, to be standing here, in plain sight, but she couldn't think of anywhere else that would be safer.
She said, “Psychopaths don't join clubs and plan mass murders as if they were Rotarians planning a charity dance. They almost always act alone.”
Flicking her eyes from shadow to shadow as if she expected one of them to have substance and malevolent intentions, Lisa said, “What about the Charles Manson commune, back in the sixties, those people who killed the movie star — what was her name?”
“Sharon Tate.”
“Yeah. Couldn't this be a group of nuts like that?”
“At most, there were half a dozen people in the core of the Manson family, and that was a very rare deviation from the lone-wolf pattern. Anyway, half a dozen couldn't do this to Snowfield. It would take fifty, a hundred, maybe more. That many psychopaths just couldn't act together.”
They were both silent for a while. Then Jenny said, “there's another thing that doesn't figure. Why wasn't there more blood in the kitchen?”
“There was some.”
“Hardly any. Just a few smears on the counter. There should've been blood all over the place.”
Lisa rubbed her hands briskly up and down her arms, trying to generate some heat. Her face was waxen in the yellowish glow of the nearest streetlamp. She seemed years older than fourteen. Terror had matured her.
The girl said, “No signs of a struggle, either.”
Jenny frowned. “That's right; there weren't.”
“I noticed it right away,” Lisa said, “It seemed so odd. They don't seem to've fought back. Nothing thrown. Nothing broken. The rolling pin would've made a pretty good weapon, wouldn't it? But he didn't use it. Nothing was knocked over, either.”
“It's as if they didn't resist at all. As if they… willingly put their heads on the chopping block.”
“But why would they do that?”
Why would they do that?
Jenny stared up Skyline Road toward her house, which was less than three blocks away, then looked down toward Ye Olde Towne Tavern, Big Nickle Variety Shop, Patterson's Ice Cream Parlor, and Mario's Pizza.
There are silences and silences. No one of them is quite like another. There is the silence of death, found in tombs and deserted graveyards and in the cold-storage room in a city morgue and in hospital rooms on occasion; it is a flawless silence, not merely a hush but a void. As a physician who had treated her share of terminally ill patients, Jenny was familiar with that special, grim silence.
This was it. This was the silence of death.
She hadn't wanted to admit it. That was why she had not yet shouted “hello?” into the funereal streets. She had been afraid no one would answer. Now she didn't shout because she was afraid someone would answer. Someone or something. Someone or something dangerous.
At last she had no choice but to accept the facts. Snowfield was indisputably dead. It wasn't really a town any more; it was a cemetery, an elaborate collection of stone-timber-shingle-brick-gabled-balconied tombs, a graveyard fashioned in the image of a quaint alpine village.
The wind picked up again, whistling under the caves of the buildings. It sounded like eternity.
Chapter 7
The County Sheriff
County authorities, headquartered in Santa Mira, were not yet aware of the Snowfield crisis. They had their own problems.
Lieutenant Talbert Whitman entered the interrogation room just as Sheriff Bryce Hammond switched on the tape recorder and started informing the suspect of his constitutional rights. Tal closed the door without making a sound. Not wanting to interrupt just as the questioning was about to get underway, he didn't take a chair at the big table, where the other three men were seated. Instead, he went to the big window, the only window, in the oblong room.
The Santa Mira County Sheriff's Department occupied a Spanish-style structure that had been erected in the late 1930s. The doors were all solid and solid-sounding when you closed them, and the walls were thick enough to provide eighteen-inch-deep windowsills like the one on which Tal Whitman settled himself.
Beyond the window lay Santa Mira, the county seat, with a population of eighteen thousand. In the mornings, when the sun at last topped the Sierras and burned away the mountain shadows, Tal found himself looking around in amazement and delight at the gentle, foothills on which Santa Mira rose, for it was an exceptionally neat, clean city that had put down its concrete and iron roots with some respect for the natural beauty in which it had grown. Now night was settled in. Thousands of lights sparkled on the rolling hills below the mountains, and it looked as if the stars had fallen here.
For a child of Harlem, black as a sharp-edged winter shadow, born in poverty and ignorance, Tal Whitman had wound up at the age of nine, in a most unexpected place. Unexpected but wonderful.
On this side of the window, however, the scene was not so special. The interrogation room resembled countless others in police precinct houses and sheriffs' stations all over the country. A cheap linoleum-tile floor. Battered filing cabinets. A round conference table and five chairs. Institutional-green walls. Bare fluorescent bulbs.